How to Sell eBooks without going through Amazon!

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The simplest way to sell ebooks without Amazon is Draft2Digital: you upload once and it sends your book to Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and libraries for about 10% of each sale. You can also upload straight to Apple Books and Kobo Writing Life, or sell from your own website, which is the hardest of the three when nobody knows you yet. Amazon is still the biggest, and I tell my students to start there, but I respect a student who won’t. Below are the options with what each charges, a short section on selling through Amazon if you change your mind, and one author who wanted to skip Amazon and what we did.

Which stores and services can you use instead of Amazon?

Sources: Draft2Digital FAQ, IngramSpark 2026 rate card (effective 01-Feb-26), IngramSpark pricing (checked 12-Nov-26), Apple Books for Authors, Kobo Writing Life terms (section 4.2, last updated 29-May-25) and Payhip pricing. Fees change, so read the current page before you start.

Barnes & Noble Press and Lulu also take uploads direct. Read their royalty pages before you choose.

An aggregator saves time, because you upload once. A direct upload gives you control of each store. Draft2Digital took over Smashwords in 2022 (Draft2Digital, 2022 year in review), so Smashwords is now part of the same company. You can try PublishDrive and others too, but check their current plans first, because they change. Draft2Digital would be my next pick after Amazon.

For print, I make more money from my paperbacks on IngramSpark than on Amazon KDP Print. I used Lulu for hardcovers for years. Amazon KDP now prints hardcovers as well, but that doesn’t help an author who wants to stay off Amazon. IngramSpark also takes your EPUB files directly.

How do you sell ebooks on Amazon instead?

Upload the ebook to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) at kdp.amazon.com, which is free to use. KDP lets you pick a 35% or a 70% royalty for each ebook. The 70% option is your list price without VAT, less a delivery cost that averages about $0.06 per unit and varies with file size, and it applies only to sales in the countries on KDP’s pricing page (KDP ebook royalties). For the full steps, see how to write, publish and sell an ebook.

If you want to sell ebooks on Amazon without writing them yourself, see my own post on using ghostwriters on Fiverr. The book must still be yours to publish, so make sure your deal with the writer hands the rights to you. The rest of this post is for when you want to sell in other stores too.

What about audiobooks without Amazon?

ACX is owned by Amazon, so it isn’t an option if you want to stay off Amazon. Use another distributor. Voices by INaudio (formerly Findaway Voices) sends audiobooks to other retailers and libraries, and Spotify for Authors covers Spotify only (Spotify support). Voices by INaudio can also send to Audible, which is Amazon’s, so choose your stores with care. Kobo Writing Life and Authors Republic are other choices.

Can you sell your ebook from your own website?

Yes, but I don’t recommend it at the start. Mark, the author in the story below, put his book into a PDF on his own website first. He then needed a payment gateway and a lot of other complicated things that I work through with my students in the advanced phases. At the beginning there are too many things to learn and you don’t have an audience. Nobody pulls out a credit card on your website for someone they don’t know. That is one of the big things Amazon gives you.

How did one author skip Amazon?

Mark didn’t want to sell his book on Amazon because of its business practices and how it treats its employees. He lives in Scotland and was writing a novel about visiting the Highlands, a subject he knew well. He thought the book could sell well because tourists were coming back to Scotland. His problem was that he saw no way to sell it without Amazon.

His first idea was the PDF on his website, which he gave up on for the reasons above. The second idea was printing the books himself on his own printer. The cost of ink for covers alone put him off, and home-printed books don’t look professional. Nobody wants to buy those. A professional look is what Amazon’s print service gives you, and that meant going back to Amazon.

Then we did a free discovery call. After that, Mark joined my Self-Publisher 1-On-1 Program, where I could look at his exact situation and walk him through the steps. I checked in daily and we met once a month on Zoom to talk through his issues. First we looked at the options and saw that Amazon isn’t the only player.

I do recommend that my students go with Amazon, even if they are opposed to it. If you’re giving it up, wait until you’re a best seller and then exit. In the beginning, going with Amazon won’t destroy everything. But I respect my students’ ethical feelings about the choices they make, and if they don’t go with Amazon, that’s fine. There are other options, as the table shows.

What did Mark do next?

Mark formatted his book in Jutoh, got it into EPUB format and put it on Draft2Digital. There was a market for it, and sales started coming in from his Draft2Digital account. He then worked on the paperback version. A good formatting tool made that easy, because you can get your book onto the market with one button. Today I recommend Atticus for formatting your book.

His book was fiction, but these methods work for any type of book.

How fast will an ebook sell without Amazon?

Slowly, at first. Amazon is the biggest store and the others are big enough to build traction, but give yourself a runway of about three to five years as you put out your books. That is my own view from publishing 230 books.

Most books don’t sell thousands of copies when they first enter the market. When I started playing the keyword games and understanding how keywords lead to sales, I targeted keywords that got some of my books to a thousand dollars a month. But you usually won’t guess those keywords on your first books. Keep writing, and build a brand around your name and your micro-niche.

You won’t make a thousand dollars a month when you get started. Some fake gurus will tell you to throw a book out there and make millions. It takes time, and you have to invest it. Mark’s whole journey started with that free discovery call. Selling books through an online shop is a different route, covered in can you sell self-published books on Etsy.

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